Health Food in the Inner City: An Interview with Brian Noy about Augsburg's Campus Kitchen
Intersections No. 36 · Fall 2012
What is Campus Kitchen? How does it serve the needs of the community?
The Campus Kitchen at Augsburg College works to make healthy food accessible to all in and around the Cedar Riverside Neighborhood. The program is a component of the Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning and shares the goal of creating a healthy community through education and service. The Kitchen provides for basic needs, service learning, leadership development, and genuine engagement between the college and the community. We have four components that all work to make learning happen though connections with food and the community:
- Food to Share: 2,000 meals are served each month by volunteers and service learners to youth programs, homeless shelters, seniors, and community centers. Most of the meals are created from the surplus food from A’viands/Augsburg Dining; some are prepared from scratch in our Campus Cooking Classes.
- Food to Grow: Our community garden provides over 80 spaces for organizations and people from the neighborhood and campus to grow their own food, as well as food for the meal program.
- Food to Buy: Our two farmers markets on campus and at the Brian Coyle Community Center allow local producers to provide for the nutritional needs of the community. Markets run on Tuesdays through the summer and even accept EBT/food stamps.
- Food to Know: Educational programming helps college students, neighborhood youth, and others make connections between food, health, and the environment by developing cooking and gardening skills.
How does this program bring Augsburg and the neighborhood together?
Clearly, the low income neighborhood that Augsburg calls home can use fresh and healthy meals. The garden originally aimed to beautify a blemished corner of campus, and to provide growing spaces to the many interested gardeners who live in the nearby high-rise apartment buildings. There is also no nearby grocer that sells a substantial selection of fresh produce, and the farmers market fills that niche.
Our meal program is now led by student leaders with support from students who volunteer from their own interest, or have a service-learning requirement in a course. The garden includes about 100 individual plots, 25 of which are managed by students, 25 by Augsburg employees, 25 by neighbors, and 25 by community organizations, including clinics, schools, and churches.
In fact, Augsburg has a deep history of training the neighborhoods’ immigrant community, beginning with its Norwegian teachers, social workers, and pastors. That history continues today as we serve Somalis, Mexicans, and others. The program clearly demonstrates the college’s commitment to service-learning and experiential education across lines of race, education, income, and religion.
It sounds like a really successful program. Do you face ongoing challenges?
It’s a great program, one that offers a lot of room for creativity. The garden is a great example of a campus space that has been fully integrated with the community, where all sorts of amazing (and sometimes dramatic) connections occur. In it, we have students working alongside other newer and often lifelong gardeners and farmers from all over the world. The biggest challenge is with liability and licenses concerns; we need to make sure that our activities fit into the expectations of insurers and city inspectors. It always works out, but seems to occupy a disproportionate amount of time and resources.
How did you come to these sustainability efforts? What’s next?
I was an undergraduate at Augsburg, and I loved working with campus and community members to make a sustainable campus and neighborhood. I have that same feeling now as a staff member as I work with idealist and creative students. Now that the program is nearly a decade old, and the heart of our operation is well established, we have more energy and time to explore other creative avenues, such as the farmers market and connections to other local farms.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm argues that the rhetoric framing ELCA higher education as a binary between “secular” and “religious” is “hokum”: there is a third way of doing higher education from a Christian perspective that is religious in motivation and practice but on the ground looks secular. After more than half a century of debates, he calls on ELCA presidents to “do something” in 2013 to move forward in shared mission and vocation.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
Mahn introduces the issue through Norman Wirzba’s The Paradise of God and the Genesis 2 vocation given to Adam to care for adamah—arguing that “vocation” is the Lutheran name for an incarnational, creation-centric theology of kenosis and that Lutherans bring distinctive theological gifts to environmental work even if no absolutely unique perspective on caring for creation.
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Ann Pederson
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Jim Dontje
Dontje, director of the Johnson Center for Environmental Innovation at Gustavus Adolphus College, describes the Center’s work with solar thermal and photovoltaic systems, LEED certification of Beck Hall, recycling and conservation initiatives, the Linnaeus Arboretum, and the difficult work of building consensus around climate response—reflecting on how Gustavus’s 1998 tornado recovery shaped a community capable of collective action, and on how the “Lutheran identity” both restrains and energizes the college’s environmental ethos.
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Article
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Jim Martin-Schramm
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Institutional Focus
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Kenneth Foster
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Cynthia Moe-Lobeda
Moe-Lobeda argues that the vocation of a Lutheran college is to prepare students for Thomas Berry’s “great work”: forging a sustainable relationship between the human species and the planet while diminishing the gap between those who have too much and those who have not enough. She develops a three-fold “moral vision” rooted in Luther’s theology of the cross—seeing what is (climate injustice and environmental racism for what they are), seeing more just and sustainable alternatives, and seeing God’s saving presence at work—and offers it as a distinctive Lutheran contribution to the panhuman and interfaith challenge of our day.
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Institutional Focus
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Garry Griffith
Griffith, Director of Dining at Augustana College (Rock Island), describes the Farm2Fork program’s shift from pre-packaged food to fresh produce sourced from local farms (beginning with Jim Johansen of Wesley Acres in Moline), the Augie Acres campus garden tended by students in learning-community courses, the bio-diesel conversion of used fryer oil for greenhouse heat and farm equipment, and the stewardship calling that grounds these efforts in Augustana’s Lutheran identity.
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Article
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Baird Tipson
Tipson—former Provost of Gettysburg College, President of Wittenberg University, and President of Washington College—reads Romans 12:2 (“be not conformed to this world…”) against Victor Ferrall’s Liberal Arts at the Brink and the contemporary financial reality of small Lutheran colleges. He tells three case-study stories from Washington College’s Center for the Environment and Society—the Chino Farms partnership, the Chesapeake Semester, and the acquisition of the work boat Callinectes—to show how presidents must engage “the world” to secure resources for sustainability work without being conformed to it.
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Reflection
Dreaming God's Dream: A Sermon on Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8
Stephan K. Turnbull
No. 34 · Fall 2011
Preached at the 2008 “Savvy with Substance” Convocation of the ELCA at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, this sermon by parish pastor Stephan K. Turnbull (First Lutheran Church, White Bear Lake) sets the small dreams of pastors and academics—balanced budgets, peaceful congregations, coherent midterm papers—over against the prophet’s dream in Isaiah 56 of a God who gathers all nations to a house of prayer for all peoples. Turnbull calls educators, preachers, and church leaders to articulate God’s dream of getting the world back through the dying of Jesus the Messiah and the resurrection’s first fruits of new creation.
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Emma Jones
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Reflection
The Importance of Connection
Alex Piedras
No. 58 · Fall 2023
Piedras reflects on the 2023 “So that We, Too, May Flourish” Conference at Augsburg as a refreshing space for a weary DEI advocate — surfacing burnout, the Talking Circle on Indigenous Issues, and Dr. Monica Smith’s Racial Healing Circle as opportunities to recharge the soul and build authentic connections for the long journey.
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James Paul Old
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6 min audio
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Lamont Anthony Wells
No. 62 · Fall 2025
Wells argues that “moral imagination” — the capacity to envision ethical alternatives, empathize across difference, and respond creatively to injustice — is the heart of ethical leadership in NECU institutions, and that anchoring leadership in this principle positions Lutheran higher education to cultivate socially responsible citizens.
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Institutional Focus
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Altheia Richardson, Angie Hambrick, Caryn Riswold, Colleen Windham-Hughes, Deanna Thompson, Marcia Bunge, Robert Clay
No. 61 · Spring 2025
The full NECU statement grounds DEIJ work in Luther’s 16th-century reforms and Lutheran theological claims about the image of God, equal dignity, and the limits of human knowing — offering definitions, Lutheran roots, and calls to action for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, with belonging as the outcome of DEIJ at work.